


the moon has died and the stars have fallen

by gingerbread man (xphantomhive)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Death, Crying, Cuddling, Depression, Funerals, Grief/Mourning, Hugging, I'm Bad At Titles, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Running Away, Unrequited Love?, hinted suicide, mentioned sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 10:02:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5535740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xphantomhive/pseuds/gingerbread%20man
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>august nineteenth</p><p>its one in the morning and im still trying to remember how your laugh sounded</p>
            </blockquote>





	the moon has died and the stars have fallen

december sixteenth

the bus is so cold that it feels like im sitting inside of a refrigerator and i want to know why you keep running away and why you wont just stay with me for once

+

“He’s run off again,” Rose tells you.

You shrug and flick some ash from your cigarette. Terezi leans into you and cackles like she’d just been told the funniest joke anyone had ever come up with in existence, and says, “Oh no, coolkid, looks like your nerdy boyfriend is on the run again!”

You shove her with your shoulder and she falls off of the fountain the two of you had been sitting on together. She pushes herself up with her elbows and finds you with her eyes like it’s nothing, even though she’s half-blind in both of them and can barely see her hand in front of her face anymore. “He ain’t my boyfriend,” you bite. “He’s an asshole.”

Terezi rolls her teal eyes and takes two cigarettes from your pack before swiping your lighter at the last second and shoving it into her back pocket before walking away. You watch her until she disappears back inside the school building, and then you look to Rose, who’s tapping her foot impatiently with her arms crossed over her chest. “You’re being oddly nonchalant about this,” she remarks. “John is gone. Again. His dad went to wake him for school today, and several of his personal belongings and clothing were-”

“Woah, shit, wait _,_ ” is what you cut her off with, eyes widening behind your shades. You’ve become so used to her trying to burn a hole through you with her glare that it doesn’t bother you anymore. “His clothes? Like, not just a few outfits, you mean _all of his clothes_?”

Rose nods. There’s a sinking feeling in your stomach. “What is it, Dave?”

You look at your hands and at Rose. You don’t want to tell her that once upon a time, back in sixth grade, when John first started this pattern of running away if the want struck, that he told you if he ever left with all of his clothes he was gone for good. He said he’d go off the map, and you could search but you’d never find him. You examine her for a good thirty seconds before deciding to lie. “It’s...nothing,” you reply. “Nothing. I was just curious.”

She raises an eyebrow. You pray she believes you, even though you aren’t religious. “Well, alright. That was an odd thing to do. You startled me.”

You apologize. She hugs you for the first time in ten years, the last being in kindergarten when the teacher forced her to because she’d pushed you off of a swing and apparently a timeout hadn’t been enough of a punishment. You’re tense at first, hands thrown up like a criminal, but eventually you settle into it. “I miss him already,” she mumbles into your chest. “When do you think he plans on coming back this time?”

You swallow. _Never_ , your mind provides unhelpfully. “Dunno,” you answer. “I miss him too.”

+

You’re tearing up pictures of you and John in a fit of rage when someone knocks on the door.

It’s a light tap at first, so you choose to ignore it and go back to your hissy fit. When it comes to be noisy enough that you think it has the chance of waking Bro up, you kick the picture fragments into the back of your closet and decide to answer it. The person is still knocking continuously during your walk to the door, and you finally shout, “Can it! I’ll be there in a second!”

When you tug the door open, you don’t expect to see John on the other side. You also don’t expect him jumping into you and wrapping his wiry arms around your neck, and you definitely don’t expect him to start crying into your chest. “Jesus shit, what the fuck, John?” You fire quickly, wrapping your arms around his torso and holding him up. He’s only five feet tall and his toes are barely brushing the ground, but he presses closer to you and cries louder. “Holy fuck, John, christ, can you calm the fuck down for three seconds?”

He doesn’t. Actually, it takes him five minutes to stop crying. By that point you’re pretty sure he’s run out of tears, or something, and he’s left quivering in your arms. “What the hell was that about?” You ask, impatiently waiting for an answer.

“I need to use your shower,” he tells you. “Please.”

“You didn’t have to cry about it,” you retort, trying to crack a joke. He doesn’t laugh. You sigh and jab your thumb in the general direction of the bathroom. “You know where it is.”

He nods and picks up a plastic bag from the floor that you didn’t notice he had before and speedwalks to your bathroom. You wait for five minutes after the shower starts running to walk into the bathroom and sit down on the toilet seat, legs crossed. “So,” you drawl, making sure you’re loud enough that he’ll hear you over the shower. You hear him jump and utter a few curses, and you snort. “Got an explanation for me?”

“Someone stole all of my stuff,” he answers. “Even my most valuable things. Sorry about the meltdown out there, but that usually makes people pretty emotional.”

You nod even though he can’t see you. “You here to stay, then?”

“No,” he shoots back instantly. “I just needed a shower. I won’t even stay the night, okay?”

You want him to stay the night. He knows you want him to stay the night.

Because you’re five years old internally and can’t deal with a situation like the fifteen-year-old boy you actually are, you stand up and flush the toilet. He screams bloody murder with a few toss-ins of the word “hot” and you’re too busy laughing to worry about the fact that his somewhat girlish scream probably woke Bro up.

+

The thing about John is, you’ve always kind of been head over heels for him.

You know he knows, and he knows that you know he does. Neither of you really talk about it, so it’s really just become another unspoken thing in your friendship. A discussion that should really happen but never has. A thing that Rose chastises the both of you for, says that the only way to have a healthy friendship is to _talk_ about important things. A thing you both tell her to shut up about, because it isn’t even relevant, and it’s obviously not affecting your friendship (it is and it has been for years, but you try not to bring it up because it’s a touchy subject for you both).

You can pinpoint exactly when it happened. Second grade. You don’t remember the date or the time, but you do remember it was overcast and the humidity was so thick that you were nearly suffocating on it. It was recess and because you were considered lame because your only friend was your step-sister who was absent that day, you were eating lunch behind a trashcan so that hopefully no one would see you.

The first thing he said to you was, “Aren’t you that weirdo kid whose only friend is his sister?”

The second and third were, “Oops, sorry! Sometimes I just say things without thinking!”

You had nodded and hoped he’d go away. He didn’t. Instead, he plopped down next to you, by a garbage can that smelled like spoiled food and broken dreams that no one in their right mind would want to be anywhere near. “I’m John Egbert!” He’d said with a smile, hand extended for you to shake.

You can tell yourself you shook his hand to be nice, but you know little you did it because his hands looked really soft (and they were). “Dave Strider.”

That was when your crush blossomed, but that wasn’t when you smashed headfirst in love with him. That happened a few weeks later, when some bitchy priss girl shoved you off of a swing. He kicked her in the shins even though you weren’t supposed to hit girls and she’d punched him in the face and broke his glasses, and you held his hand while they took the glass out of his cheeks at the hospital.

It only took Rose three days to figure out you had a crush on him. She didn’t make a big deal of it or anything, only turned her desk toward yours during art class one day and asked, “You have a crush on John, right?” then smiled when your face turned strawberry red.

It took him significantly longer. Four years longer, to be exact. He found out in sixth grade when Terezi accidentally blurted it out and looked at you so damn apologetic after it happened that you ran to the boys bathroom. You locked yourself inside and John sat against the door, knees drawn to his chest, you were sure. “Hey, it’s…” he’d trailed off. You knew he would do that. “Okay. It’s okay Dave, I’m not gonna stop being your best friend, okay? I’m alright. You are too. Our friendship is okay.”

The thing is, your friendship never was okay after that.

+

When John comes out of the bathroom a few minutes later, he’s wearing a pair of your boxers that look like shorts on him and your old scratched record shirt that hasn’t fit you since you were eleven, but it still somehow manages to hang loosely off of his torso. What small expanses of his skin you can see are blistering red, nothing like his normally pale skin. He glares when he sees you on the sofa, and you smile innocently. “What the fuck, dude?” He snaps.

“Whaddya mean, "what the fuck?" Gonna have to elaborate for me,” you respond sarcastically, with a hint of snark that you get from hanging around Lalonde so often.

“I mean, why the hell did you try to burn my skin off?”

You snort. “Water can’t get that hot,” you respond. “Barely that hot when there isn’t someone flushing the toilet. Bro’s a cheap fucker who doesn’t pay the water bill three quarters of the time even though he has the money for it.”

He narrows his eyes. You sigh. “I want you to stay,” you say, as earnestly as possible for a Strider. “The night. Forever. I don’t fuckin’ care, just stay for once in your damn life.”

It’s his turn to sigh, now. “Dave, you know I can’t do that.”

“And why the fuck _not_?” You fire back instantly. You know your voice is raising and you know your Bro is sleeping and you should probably keep quiet, but _fuck_ are you pissed about this. “Why the fuck can you not stay for _once_ in your fucking life? I’m not asking you to stay for the rest of your fucking life John, I’m asking you to stay for _one night_.”

“My mom is dead,” he says, and you think there might be tears in his eyes but it’s too dark to tell and the small lamp isn’t much help. “My mom is dead and my dad has been depressed since I was ten, okay, Dave? He’s tried to kill himself four times and every single time _I_ was the one who had to call the hospital and _I_ was the one who had to tell the nurses and doctors that no, I don’t have a mom or any other family and no, my dad won’t go to therapy.”

You thought you’d be the one in hysterics, but it seems the tables have turned because John is standing in your living room at one in the morning with tear-soaked cheeks and dark circles under his eyes. You wonder, briefly, when the last time he got a good night of sleep was. “I didn’t know that. I didn’t know any of that.”

“That’s because I didn’t tell you,” he replies. “I didn’t tell anyone.”

“Just stay,” you say. “One night. It’s freezing outside.”

He glances at the window and back to you. It’s started snowing; nothing bad, not like that major snowstorm you had a couple of years ago that knocked everyone’s power out for a week and had school cancelled for a month, but bad enough that the roads and sidewalks will be slick and he’ll have a hard time getting anywhere from here. “One night,” he tells you weakly. “Please hold me.”

You’d rather sleep in your bed than on the couch, but you’re already opening your arms for him and he’s already collapsing into them. He buries his face in your chest and it isn’t long before he’s hiccuping and sobbing and apologizing to you and Rose and Jade and his dad. You don’t know what to do so you rub circles on his back and murmur to him that he’ll be okay and no one is mad at him, and he holds onto your shoulders so hard it hurts. He falls asleep after fifteen minutes and twenty seconds of incoherent babbling and weeping muffled by your shirt. You timed it in your head because you wanted it to stop.

His grip goes limp and you breathe a sigh of relief, moving his hands from your shoulders to your ribcage. You shift him onto his back and take his glasses off, which are smudged and covered in little droplets from him being shoved against your chest and his crying. There are still tears clinging to his lashes and you wipe them off with your thumbs, careful not to wake him. Then you turn him back onto his side and he nuzzles into your chest, winding his hands in your shirt and clinging to you like you’re his lifeline.

You kiss his head. He whimpers pitifully.

+

november twentieth

its three in the morning and my house is freezing because bro is an asshole, and were tangled together like jades ridiculous tangle buddies and im looking at you and your stupidly long eyelashes and cracked lips and messy black hair and wondering if you miss me like i miss you

+

When you wake up the next morning, John is gone. The analog clock on the wall tells you it’s ten am and there’s a pounding in your head, so you reach for the drawer of the coffee table and pull out a bottle of aspirin. You down three of them with a bottle of water on the table next to you, one you got for John at five in the morning when he woke you up to tell you he was thirsty.

There’s a note on the table by the front door. You grab it with shaking hands and unfold it. Your phone pings from somewhere across the room, probably a message from Terezi or Rose, but you could care less right now.

dave,

it is six in the morning and you’re sleeping like the dead. sheesh, do you ever go to bed? i bet not! you are probably up all night making shitty raps about my eyes are something, heh. anyway, i wanted to tell you what you did was very nice, but it was not going to make me stay! i know you wanted me to, and i wanted to, too, but there are just some things i can’t do for you. :( i am very sorry, dave! please tell rose and jade that i miss them and i am sorry to them, too.

please don’t tell my dad. i need him to worry about me so he does not worry about killing himself because he is too concerned about my whereabouts.

i know you still love me. i do not know what to make of that.

john

You don’t notice that you’re crying until you’re finished reading, because the letter is written in his chicken scratch and blue sharpie and there’s a picture of him that he definitely took with your camera and printed with your printer paperclipped to the paper. You want to tear it up but you don’t at the same time, so you settle for stomping to your room and chucking it into the back of your closet where you won’t see it and won’t think about it.

You swipe your phone from the ground on your way back to the sofa. There’s a few new messages from Terezi and ten missed calls from Rose. You decide to answer Terezi first because you’re an asshole.

DAVE: yo rezi whats up

TEREZI: YOU D1DNT H34R TH3 N3WS?

DAVE: ugh my head is pounding too hard for your shitty leetspeak

DAVE: what news

TEREZI: JUST TURN ON TH3 TV

TEREZI: 1TS ON 3V3RY LOC4L N3WS ST4T1ON

You do as she says and turn on the TV. They’re playing a rerun of Maury on the channel it’s on right now, and as tempted as you are to watch that because women yelling about who the father of their child is makes you laugh, you decide to listen to your friend for once and turn the station to a local news channel. There’s a commercial on, so you call Rose while you wait.

The first thing you hear when she answers is a sigh of relief. The seconds is her asking, “Did you hear the news?”

You roll your eyes. “Not yet. News channel is on now.”

“Turn it off,” Rose says. You open your mouth to argue, and as if she senses it, she cuts you off with a firm, “Don’t argue, Dave.”

You turn the TV off because that is Rose’s serious voice, and if Rose is using her serious voice than something is truly wrong. You get ready to ask what the hell is up, but Rose is already telling you. “John’s dead,” she tells you quietly. “The bus he was a passenger in crashed over the guardrail and into the freezing lake beneath. The driver was not in control of his mental facilities, likely drunk, and he killed himself along with John and the other passenger on the bus. I’m so sorry, Dave.”

You hang up the phone because you’re sure all of this has to be an elaborate prank.

+

It is not, in fact, an elaborate prank.

A week after Rose tells you, you, her, and Jade are called to the police station because they have a few bodies and they’d like to know if you can identify any of them. Rose assures you that you don’t have to go, Jade tries to force you not to, but in the end you do anyway. The three of you twiddle your thumbs in a waiting room for about ten minutes before a very professional looking woman walks into the waiting room and says, “I’m looking for Rose Lalonde, Dave Strider, and Jade Harley?”

You stand first. Jade follows. Rose is last. The woman smiles when she sees the three of you, stretches an arm out and goes, “Right this way. Last door on the right.” Rose thanks her, but you and Jade say nothing.

The hallway you walk down is long and dimly lit, and the last door on the right is a room that’s colder than Colorado in the middle of winter. There are three bodies lying on three tables, all tagged, all obviously dead. You’ve never seen the one on the left end before; it’s a man, round with some stubble, and gray eyes that no one has had the decency to close yet. You’ve never seen the one on the other end, either. It’s a woman, small and dainty, with ruby red fingernails and high cheekbones with soft brown hair that frames her face like a halo.

You’ve seen the one in the middle. You know the one in the middle.

It’s John. He doesn’t have his glasses, but his eyelashes are long and they brush against his high cheekbones that are even nicer than the chick’s next to him. You’re the only one who can stomach walking up to the body, where the examiner stands with a clipboard in her hands that she’s holding so tight that you think it might break and you tell her that his name is John Egbert and he’s fifteen years old. Rose and Jade are shaking in the corner. Jade is sobbing.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” the examiner says, and that’s the first time someone says it to you, but not the last. “Was he your boyfriend?”

“No,” you snap coldly. You stare down at his lifeless body, petal pink lips turned blue, bags under his eyes because he rarely ever slept, skin so pale he looks like a ghost. You’re glad his eyes are closed because you don’t want to see them, because he had the ocean in his eyes and you don’t want to see them dead and lifeless, like he is. “He was an asshole.”

The examiner gapes at you. Rose and Jade do too.

You walk out of the room with your shoulders drawn but your head held high. Your shades are too dark for anyone to tell that you’re crying.

+

John dies in November, but you don’t have his funeral until May. No one tells his dad that he died, and every time you think you’ll be the one to do it (please don’t tell my dad) you chicken out at the last minute. By the time his funeral rolls around, John’s own father doesn’t know that his son is about to be six feet under, and no one has the guts to tell him. That means the only people attending his funeral are you, Rose, Jade, Terezi, and some kid named Karkat who John was apparently close friends with.

It rains on the day of his funeral and you forget an umbrella, but whenever someone offers to let you under theirs you decline. The rain soaks through your rented tux and pools in your shoes, and by the time the funeral is half over you’re shivering and sneezing. Rose offers to give you her umbrella. You tell her you don’t need it.

Each of you throw a flower into John’s coffin before you close it, and you’re last. You tell him you love him even though he can’t hear you and throw in a blue tulip, which looks weird mixed with the four white flowers everyone else had thrown in. But you knew John liked blue. He’d be angry to see white flowers on top of his dead body.

You take the other four out to lunch after everything is done and pay for them too, despite their protests. Whenever one of them pulls out their wallet to try and sneak money into the bill, you tell them to put it away before you break their fingers. It works pretty well.

+

february fourteenth

today is valentines day and youve been dead since november, and i want to know if you remember how we used to watch romcoms together and eat candy that was on sale because what kind of asshole buys candy at the last minute, and i want to know if you ever knew that i watched you more than the movie

+

Almost a year after John’s death, Rose decides she’s going to move in with you. She tells you it’s because she wants to keep a close eye on you. You ask her if she thinks you’re going to kill yourself if she isn’t around, and she tells you no, but the look in her eye tells you yes. “Bro’s here,” is the first excuse you feed her. “He works from home.”

“He DJs at night,” she responds. By how fast the reply is, you think she already knew you were going to give that excuse and had an answer ready. “I called him up and asked if he would mind if I took residence here for an untold amount of time. He told me he didn’t care.”

You don’t have any excuses from there. After a few days Rose lets her girlfriend Aranea move in, and when you ask her if Bro said that was okay too she nods. “Aranea is a therapist,” Rose explains, hauling a cerulean bag over her shoulder. “In training, I must add. It’ll be good for you to have a therapist in training and a girl who has a vast knowledge of therapy around you.”

At night you hear them having sex. The headboard smacks against the wall and their moans are loud enough to wake the neighbors, so you buy a pair of noise cancelling headphones with money saved up from your job at the shitty supermarket down the street and wear them to bed every night to drown out the sound completely. Sometimes in the morning Rose is up first, and she asks you how you are. You tell her fine. Sometimes in the morning Aranea is up first, and she asks you how you are, too. You tell her perfectly fine.

They’re waiting for you to have a breakdown, and you wish it wasn’t so painfully obvious.

+

november twentieth

its one in the morning and exactly a year ago today you were yelling at me and crying in my living room and telling me why you couldnt stay and i feel like a dumbass for letting you go, i shouldve tried harder i shouldve made you stay this is all my fault im so sorry john im so sorry you were only fifteen you didnt deserve this

+

You finally break down in December.

Rose is out buying you apple juice, but Aranea is home. You’re digging through your closet to find your other red converse when your hand brushes something that feels like a picture even though you know you’d never treat a photograph so badly, so you wrap your hand around whatever it is and tug it from its hiding spot. Your throat closes up when you see that it’s the picture John took with your camera before he left, before he left you and boarded the bus that would take him on his last bus ride.

Before you know it you’re sobbing and holding the picture to your chest with shaking hands, and it takes Aranea 0.1 seconds to barge into your room like she owns the place. When she wraps you in a hug you don’t try to pull away. You bury your face in her chest and grip her biceps like she’s your lifeline, and she whispers reassurances into your hair that you aren’t listening to.

“It’s my fault,” you croak. “I let him leave.”

“It is _not_ your fault,” Aranea shoots back right away. “You didn’t know he would die.”

“But I let him leave, Aranea. I let him leave and I could’ve made him _stay._ ”

“You know that’s not true, Dave. You know no amount of convincing would’ve made him stay.”

You know that’s the truth. John was yours but he wasn’t _yours_ , and you could’ve offered him everything he’s ever wanted in the world and he still wouldn’t have stayed. You twist your fingers into the fabric of Aranea’s dress that’s almost the same color as his eyes and try to loosen your grip so that you don’t hurt her, but her arms are still around you and she isn’t complaining so you can’t be gripping her that hard.

When Rose comes home she hugs you too and then they both hug you, and you cry into Rose’s hideous purple sweater while Aranea rubs your back and they both tell you that you’ll be okay.

+

april thirteenth

today is your birthday and i regret that i never told you that i got you flowers and a diamond ring for your birthday one year like you were a girl or something but i did it because i love you and i still love you and i dont know why you wouldnt just stay with me

+

John never did stay in one place, even when he wasn’t running away. When you played hide and seek on his thirteenth birthday because Jade thought it would be fun, he switched his hiding spots more than once which made it hard to keep track of him. When you played spin the bottle and kissed him for the first time, he was fidgeting, and his hands were ghosting over your back and shoulders and ribcage like he didn’t know where he was supposed to put them.

John Egbert was an unstoppable force of nature.

+

You only visit his grave one time, in the middle of a snowstorm two years after the night he died, the night you had your chance to make him stay. There are tears in your eyes by the time you pull up at the cemetery, and you’re surprised to find someone else already there. You think it might be Aranea, but you can’t tell behind your shades and the snow. You shuffle to John’s grave even though you’re knee-deep in snow, and once you make it there, you realize it is Aranea.

“What are you doin’ here?” You ask, and she jumps. She looks between you and the grave, clears her throat, and stands. There’s snow clinging to the bottom of her dress.

“I thought it’d be nice to see his grave,” she tells you. “Even though I never met him.”

You raise an eyebrow. She clears her throat again. You wonder, briefly, if that’s a nervous tick or something. “He was great,” you say, leaning by the stone. Aranea kneels by you, tucking her dress under her knees so they don’t get cold and her stockings don’t get soaked through. That’s what you’re assuming, at least. “Sweeter than anyone you’ve ever met. Selfless and selfish at the same time. I loved him.”

“Oh,” Aranea responds quietly, dusting the fresh covering of snow off of his name. “Okay.”

+

december sixteenth

its three in the morning and this rope feels scratchy against my neck

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact: i had no intention of killing anyone in this. in fact, i was planning to make it have a happy ending.  
> we see how that worked out.
> 
> guh, i re-wrote this about a million times and i _still_ hate the outcome, but whatever. hope you liked it; i'll probably be posting another oneshot or something soon because i have a few song inspirations currently and also growing up/slice of life oneshots are my favorite.
> 
> \+ sorry for abrupt ending! i wanted to end it like that for some odd reason. i may write more if anyone wants it?
> 
> merry christmas!


End file.
